Voltage island based heterogeneous NoC design through constraint programming

This paper discusses heterogeneous Network-on-Chip (NoC) design from a Constraint Programming (CP) perspective and extends the formulation to solving Voltage-Frequency Island (VFI) problem. In general, VFI is a superior design alternative in terms of thermal constraints, power consumption as well as performance considerations. Given a Communication Task Graph (CTG) and subsequent task assignments for cores, cores are allocated to the best possible places on the chip in the first stage to minimize the overall communication cost among cores. We then solve the application scheduling problem to determine the optimum core types from a list of technological alternatives and to minimize the makespan. Moreover, an elegant CP model is proposed to solve VFI problem by mapping and grouping cores at the same time with scheduling the computation tasks as a limited capacity resource allocation model. The paper reports results based on real benchmark datasets from the literature. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Using constraint programming for the design of network-on-chip architectures

NoC technology is composed of packet-based interconnections, where the communication resources are distributed across the network. Therefore, the optimal resource utilization is a crucial consideration for efficient architectural designs. This paper studies the practicality of the Constraint Programming (CP) models for NoC architecture designs that effectively use a regular mesh with wormhole switching and the XY routing. The complexity of the CP models is compared with the earlier Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) models. Practical CP-based mapping and scheduling models are developed and results are reported on the benchmark datasets. Results indicate that mapping and scheduling problems can be solved at near optimality even under relatively shorter run-time limits as compared to those required by the MIP models